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1611: Authority, Gender and the Word in Early Modern England by Helen Wilcox

By Helen Wilcox

1611: Authority, Gender, and the note in Early sleek England explores problems with authority, gender, and language inside and around the number of literary works produced in a single of such a lot landmark years in literary and cultural heritage.

Represents an exploration of a 12 months within the textual lifetime of early glossy England

Juxtaposes the diversity and variety of texts that have been released, performed, learn, or heard within the comparable 12 months, 1611

Offers an account of the textual tradition of the yr 1611, the surroundings of language, and the tips from which the authorized model of the English Bible emerged

The sensational narratives of John Lyly, Robert Greene, and Thomas hotel verified prose fiction as an autonomous style within the past due 16th century. The texts they created are a paradoxical mixture of outrageous plotting and rhetorical sophistication, low and high tradition. even supposing their works have been feverishly wolfed via modern readers, those writers tend to be merely identified to scholars as resources for Shakespearean comedy.

This comparative research attracts on working-class autobiography, public and boarding university memoirs, and the canonical autobiographies through men and women within the uk to outline subjectivity and price inside of social category and gender in 19th- and early twentieth-century Britain. Gagnier reconsiders conventional differences among brain and physique, deepest hope and public reliable, aesthetics and software, and truth and cost within the context of lifestyle.

It is usually suggestion that the varied contradictory views in Margaret Cavendish's writings display her lack of ability to reconcile her feminism together with her conservative, royalist politics. during this ebook Lisa Walters demanding situations this view and demonstrates that Cavendish's rules extra heavily resemble republican concept, and that her method is the basis for subversive political, medical and gender theories.

Extra resources for 1611: Authority, Gender and the Word in Early Modern England

Example text

He likens Oberon to Mercury, the ‘god of tongue’ who was said to have wooed Penelope with winning words, and draws a parallel between Oberon and Apollo, the god who sang expressively to the accompaniment of his harp (344). Facility with language, the very basis of the textual culture with which 1611 is so rich, is already to be seen here as fundamental to the projected ideal of royalty. The King, who in Oberon is simultaneously both the Arthur of romance and the James of reality, is said to ‘teach’ his people ‘by the sweetnesse of his sway’, his persuasive rhetoric, ‘And not by force’ (353): language, literally, rules.

Similarly, the great debates of the mid-century are anticipated in the birth of the political theorist James Harington in 1611 and the arrival on the scene of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who in this year was resident at ‘The omnipotency of the word’ 19 Hardwick Hall as tutor to the young William Cavendish (subsequently second Earl of Devonshire) and may well have acted as scribe for Cavendish’s anonymous 1611 publication, A Discourse against Flatterie (Rahe, 246). 1611 also saw the birth of Sir Thomas Urquhart, the Scottish writer who was to translate the works of Rabelais into English and publish them in 1653; in the same year (1611), Robert Herrick, later famed as the author of Hesperides (1648), wrote his earliest known poem, a classically inspired praise of the country life addressed to his brother Thomas (Herrick, 34).

Masques were an integral part of courtly celebrations and central to the iconography of royalty by 1611; their plots often incorporated rebellious energies shown to be overcome by peaceful authority, and their mixture of drama, music, dance and visual splendour was a symbolic display of learning, largesse and patronage. The masque to mark the beginning of 1611, Oberon, The Faery Prince, was no exception: it was the result of collaborative work by some of the greatest creative artists active in England at the time.